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Cookie paywalls allow visitors to access the content of a website only after making a choice between paying a fee (paying option) or accepting tracking (cookie option). The practice has been studied in previous research in regard to its…
As third-party cookies are being phased out or restricted by major browsers, first-party cookies are increasingly repurposed for tracking. Prior work has shown that third-party scripts embedded in the main frame can access and exfiltrate…
In the modern Web, service providers often rely heavily on third parties to run their services. For example, they make use of ad networks to finance their services, externally hosted libraries to develop features quickly, and analytics…
Online websites use cookie notices to elicit consent from the users, as required by recent privacy regulations like the GDPR and the CCPA. Prior work has shown that these notices use dark patterns to manipulate users into making…
Despite stringent data protection regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and other country-specific regulations, many websites continue to use cookies to track user…
The web is global, but privacy laws differ by country. Which set of privacy rules do websites follow? We empirically study this question by detecting and analyzing cookie notices in an automated way. We crawl 1,500 European, American, and…
Different countries have different privacy regulatory models. These models impact the perspectives and laws surrounding internet privacy. However, little is known about how effective the regulatory models are when it comes to limiting…
While companies increasingly rely on data, especially when it comes to targeted advertising, adapting content to users, selling data and training machine learning models, the collection of data raises privacy concerns. One way of collecting…
A dominant regulatory model for web privacy is "notice and choice". In this model, users are notified of data collection and provided with options to control it. To examine the efficacy of this approach, this study presents the first…
To what extent are users surveilled on the web, by what technologies, and by whom? We answer these questions by combining passively observed, anonymized browsing data of a large, representative sample of Americans with domain-level data on…
Health information websites offer instantaneous access to information, but have important privacy implications as they can associate a visitor with specific medical conditions. We interviewed 35 residents of Canada to better understand…
Web tracking by ad networks, social networks, and other third parties is privacy-invasive. To protect users' privacy an increasing number of countries are adopting new privacy laws. However, a major reason why their application on the web…
Web cookies are ubiquitously used to track and profile the behavior of users. Although there is a solid empirical foundation for understanding the use of cookies in the global world wide web, thus far, limited attention has been devoted for…
To protect users' privacy, legislators have regulated the usage of tracking technologies, mandating the acquisition of users' consent before collecting data. Consequently, websites started showing more and more consent management modules --…
Many internet ventures rely on advertising for their revenue. However, users feel discontent by the presence of ads on the websites they visit, as the data-size of ads is often comparable to that of the actual content. This has an impact…
Third-party tracking is common on almost all commercially operated websites. Prior work has studied in detail the extent of third-party tracking on the web, detection of third-party trackers, and defending against third-party tracking.…
The rise of cookie paywalls ('pay-or-ok' models) has prompted growing debates around the right to privacy and data protection, monetisation, and the legitimacy of user consent. Despite their increasing use across sectors, limited research…
Consider two brands that want to jointly test alternate web experiences for their customers with an A/B test. Such collaborative tests are today enabled using \textit{third-party cookies}, where each brand has information on the identity of…
Web applications often include third-party content and scripts to personalize a user's online experience. These scripts have unrestricted access to a user's private data stored in the browser's persistent storage like cookies, localstorage…
Cookies maintain state across related web traffic. As such, cookies are commonly used for authentication by storing a user's session ID and replacing the need to re-enter credentials in subsequent traffic. These so-called ``session…